‘Transparency as a Justification for Legislative Supremacy’, 10 May 2017

Dr Eoin Daly (NUI Galway)

Dr Eoin Daly (NUI Galway) will present ‘Transparency as a Justification for Legislative Supremacy’ on Wednesday 10 May 2017, 4:00–5:30pm.

"In this paper, I revisit what we understand by the non-transparent nature of constitutional jurisprudence, compared with legislative decisions concerning rights. Relying on Pierre Bourdieu, I will argue that while judicial review can be understood as a quintessentially esoteric and thus as a dominating practice, its doctrinal artifice is nonetheless irreducible to interests that are antecedent to law itself. Rather, it generates forms of symbolic and social capital that are peculiar to law as a semi-autonomous social “field”. Nonetheless, non-transparency of this kind can be understood as an important kind of political domination that can support the argument for legislative supremacy."